


Count of Three

by hitlikehammers



Category: The Martian (2015)
Genre: Chris Burns Coffee and Sneaks French Fries at Work Because Potatoes Aren't Allowed in the House, Domesticity, M/M, Mark Still Narrates His Days Sometimes and Teaches a Night Class to Watch Undergrads Squirm, Post-Canon, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-27
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-23 12:46:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6116913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the mission. For the music. For the man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Count of Three

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by an offline friend's off-hand comment, really. And when I respond with, "Yeah, maybe I'll write that," sometimes I actually end up meaning it, and doing it. Et voilà.

**_.for the mission._ **

 

“It was supposed to be me.”

Mark turns his head, prone as he is on the exam table. It’s a little cold, and the air tastes different in a way he half-forgot, hasn’t yet wholly remembered, and he’s still blinking through the fact that it might be one horrible, wonderful dream, but he didn’t really dream down there, on the surface. He never ever really stopped to wonder why.

But yeah. So. 

Probably real, then.

“I’m not even gonna blame this one on the whole being-alone-on-Mars thing,” Mark says, deadpan as hell, and thank god he never lost his fucking sense of humor in this shitshow. “I don’t follow.”

“To grab you, when you,” Chris, uncharacteristically inarticulate, pokes violently at his palm, and Mark—because he’s intelligent, see; there was this one time where he even survived on a whole other planet; well, smart-friggin-Mark gets the picture.

“Commander stole your thunder,” Mark shakes his head, lets himself grin a little as his eyes drift closed. After everything, including the adrenaline high and its subsequent crash: he’s fucking exhausted.

And for the first time in a really long time, he’s allowed to be.

That’s fucking gorgeous, is what that is. 

And honestly? If Chris actually thinks he’s going to get him to stay awake through a comprehensive NASA-approved physical exam here and now, he can think a-fucking-gain.

They want their vitals and whatever, they can take them while he sleep for at least forever.

“No, it wasn’t, see, I just, I wanted to,” Chris starts up again, and Mark forces his eyes to crack back open because Chris doesn’t stutter. And just now, Chris is stuttering.

More specifically, Chris sounds like someone’s got him in a chokehold, like he can’t fucking breathe.

And that’s a sound Mark is intimately familiar with. So. 

But Chris is just standing there. Tablet in hand, staring not at the screen but at the floor.

Chris’s chest expands long, and slow, and Mark doesn’t pretend not to watch it, dream within a not-dream as the spectacle is, while Chris visibly steels himself for something big and heavy and fierce before he opens that stupid, pretty mouth of his.

“It wasn’t just fucking.”

Oh. Well, that’s certainly not where Mark thought this was going.

Huh.

“How’d we go from my Iron Man moment to the horizontal tango, Beck?” Mark can’t help but ask. “I mean, fuck, maybe being down there really did do something to my neural functioning, because you are all over the goddamn map, Doc.”

“Fucking hell, Watney,” Chris bites out, but jaw clenched, lips tight: it seems more like biting back than lashing out. 

Interesting.

“Do have any idea,” he starts, and his hand goes to his mouth, long fingers. Broad grasp. “Can you even...” 

He breathes in through the gaps between fingers. It whistles a little. Rustles like leaves.

The only defense Mark has for these thoughts is that he’s a botanist. And he’s kinda missed leaves.

Among other things.

“Can you _imagine_ what it felt like to call your death?”

Chris’s voice shudders on that last word. And Mark can imagine a lot of things. A lot of worse things, in fact. But watching Chris’s face when he _says_ it, well. Damn.

Even Mark can see that this is a _worst thing_. For Chris, at least.

Though fuck is Mark can figure out what that means. Sleep deprived and all. Rescued from another planet. Et cetera. 

“And then,” Chris picks back up, a hysterical sort of edge fighting for control of his tone; “to find out I’d been wrong? That I’d made the call that got you left behind on fucking _Mars_?”

This is another _worst thing_ , Mark can clearly see that. He thinks he can relate to this one a little better, though.

“And yeah, okay, we played it subtle and casual, whatever, right, what happens in space stays in space. But I,” and Chris is babbling, hands gesturing in that way of his that completely discredits the calm-collected-medical-professional persona he tries to uphold all one in ten of the times he actually gives a shit to do so. 

This absolutely negates that one-in-ten.

But Mark loves watching those hands fucking go. When he thought about Earth, and home, and people and things and missing and losing: when he thought about it, in the dark, he thought about those hands a lot.

Again: huh.

“But it’s not just fucking,” Chris finally says; gets to the point. “And goddamn you, Mark, but I wanted to be the one to see you first. To,” and all the fight drains out of him in the rapidfire beat of a racing fucking heart as Chris reaches, half hesitant. Half determined as hell.

“To touch you,” and the determined-half wins out. It always does. “First.”

Mark can’t help the intake of breath, sharp; the leaning of his whole body, needy; the high-pitched aborted sound in the back of his throat, beyond his control: he can’t help Chris’s hand on his jaw, and what it does. How it feels.

He doesn’t want to. Not in the least.

“No.”

Chris’s eyes widen, and he makes to step back, but Mark is ahead of him. Mark is tired as hell, and drained, and barely crawling in the whole consciousness department, but he grabs Chris’s hand and leans back against the table, pulling Chris with him but it’s really more a matter of Chris following and guiding him down because his pull means next to nothing, weak as he is, and he sighs. Because touch.

He missed it, but he didn’t realize how much.

He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed _this_.

Whatever it was. Whatever it is. Whatever it could be, and isn’t _just_.

“No,” Mark murmurs, and Chris’s hand is so goddamn _warm_.

“It’s not just fucking.”

 

_**..for the music..** _

 

He still talks out loud, sometimes: narrates his day—plays his own commentator, even now. His own personal backing track of _not-disco-fucking-never-disco-again_. 

Chris wonders if he even notices. He just remembers that Mark was a smartass before, sure, and liked to talk—often whilst playing tongue hockey. Sometimes through sex. Chris used to be tempted to gag the bastard to shut him up, but Mark would have liked it too much. Way too much.

And once Chris had lost it—for what he thought was forever—well.

All he thought about was just how much Mark has liked to talk. About everything he said. Every lilt and give and sigh of his voice, so he’d remember it. Because Mark has always liked to talk.

Just not quite like _this_.

“And so I told them, right, so, fuck yourselves,” Mark sounds like he’s winding down, after—Chris glances at the bedside table for the time; they’ve been lying here for an hour and seventeen minutes, exactly, because they’d gone to bed at 10:30, after the last evening rerun of classic _SNL_ wrapped up; but honestly, this happens less and less these days, and Chris still hasn’t got over just _watching_ Mark talk. The way he barely even stops to breathe between words. The light in his eyes.

Chris isn’t sure, after everything, if it’s physically possible for him to get over that; for him to get tired of that.

And Chris knows what’s physically possible and impossible better than most people. Particularly with regard to Mark Watney. 

“Fuck yourselves,” Mark continues, “because I’m not going on your reunion tour of that time you almost left me to die on Mars because you were too squeamish to maybe see my corpse on sat-cam, right?”

Chris hums, because yes: fuck NASA, and Chris would say it over and again and heartily too, if it wasn’t for the fact that Mark was still connected, still cared, still trained the next best and brightest among them to search the stars—and yes, Chris still believed in that, he’d have gone and been a good little research hospital monkey who only saw patients when his lab needed upgrades if he hadn’t, but hell if Chris needs any more reminders in his life of “that time”—

And hell if Chris wants any more difficulty in avoiding the fact that they’re coming up on three years, now, and they’re making a deal about it: _Ares III, Three Years After_ and that bullshit, and all Chris wants to do is live in the now, because the now doesn’t mean thinking Mark’s dead before he’d ever said anything, before they were, before they _tried_ —

Now means they get up in the morning and eat breakfast on the couch with their shoulders brushing. Now means they use different toothpastes but keep their toothbrushes in the same cup in the bathroom. Now means boring shit, and Chris having to eat anything potato-related on his lunch breaks at work, and sometimes he literally just eats fries, and fries, and more fries and then chews gum all afternoon so that when he kisses Mark when he gets home he won’t get a lecture about the evils of potatoes, and now. _Now_.

Now means a bed, with two warm sides, from two warm bodies, and space in the middle where they meet.

So yes. Fuck NASA.

“Plus that’s finals week for my undergrads,” Mark’s still going on; “And I’m so not going to trade the opportunity to watch the little bastards sweat because they can’t tell me anything except some textbook bullshit about the powerhouse of the goddamn cell.”

Chris snorts. 

“Couldn’t _possibly_ miss that.” 

Mark and his goddamn undergrads. He said he’d wanted to teach the community college night course as a way to get his head out of the “upper fucking atmosphere,” as he’d put it, but Chris thinks he did it just because he enjoys tormenting them.

Mark’s mouth is stretched wide in a grin where it presses to the corner of Chris’s lips.

“ _Exactly_.”

Chris lets the silence stretch for a second, to make certain it’s a sure thing, before he interjects.

“So if I made dinner reservations,” he starts, hypothetical-like, because here’s the thing: it’s the mission anniversary, yes, that, fuck NASA, whatever. And they call it by the rescue of one Mark Watney.

So the mission anniversary is another anniversary too, really. One that Chris cares infinitely more about.

“You’d want to make sure they had a decent bar,” Mark says automatically. “Grading exams? God knows I’ll need it.”

Chris grins, and Mark leans into him, kisses him full on the lips this time before he pulls back, just enough so their mouths only brush.

“Also, it’d be unnecessary.”

Chris quirks a brow.

“Already made ‘em,” Mark smirks at him, and Chris probably feels unduly touched that his partner remembered their anniversary, even though given the givens, it’s a hard thing to forget.

Still. 

If Chris maybe pulls him in and shows how much it means with particular enthusiasm, no one’s complaining. 

 

_**...for the man...** _

 

Here’s a fun fact: Chris Beck?

_Not_ a morning person.

So waking up to an empty bed is not Mark’s status quo. The few and far between occurrences of such an event are therefore navigated via very specific parameters, as follows:

One: Mark blinks, blinks again, then gets on his knees and flops from the waist, arms and legs spread wide as he falls face-first onto the bed with a humph.

Two: Mark sighs into the mattress, burrows his head into the cushion of it, and damn well moans: “ _Bed_.”

Three: Mark remains this way until he feels satisfied, and fine, okay, maybe a little lonely, because he’s a creature of habit, and on the down-low: steps one through three take place most mornings.

It’s just that Step One involves wrapping around a sleep-warm Chris, Step Two ends with a nuzzle to the stubble on Chris’s chin and an additional moan of _“Mmm, you,_ and Step Three, well, it doesn’t end lonely.

It ends with Chris grabbing Mark’s pillow and hitting him with it until Mark goes to make their coffee.

So, inevitably, in times like the present, there is a Step Four: go find Chris, and fix what’s wrong.

Mark smells the burnt coffee before he's halfway down the steps. Because there's more than just Chris’s hatred of mornings that rendered Mark the designated coffee maker. 

“Come here,” Chris’s voice comes from the sofa in the pitch black before Mark can say anything, before Mark can even check to see where Chris is, or ask what's bugging him, or make some smart ass quip to coax a smile from him, and help him forget whatever it is that’s upset him. 

Chris’s voice comes first, though: and it's rough with more than just the early hour and the shitty coffee he ruined for himself. So Mark does the only thing he can do.

He goes to his man, just like Chris asked. 

He's barely toe to toe with the couch before Chris reaches for him, tugs him down so that Mark nearly drops straight on top of him, and Chris has his limbs circled around Mark’s body as best he can manage at the angle, his chest rising and falling into Mark’s own too fast and too shallow, his nose at the hollow of Mark’s throat as those breaths start to even, slowly but surely with just the touch of skin.

“What’s got you clingy so early?” Mark murmurs just below Chris’s ear, kissing the thin skin and wrapping his own arms around Chris in kind, holding him close. 

Chris doesn't speak until his breath comes at an even pace again. Until he’s steady in Mark’s hold, and only there because he wants it, not because he might break apart otherwise. 

“They’re going up again today.”

Mark drops a kiss to the top Chris's head. “Yeah.”

That would explain not being able to sleep. For all that it was Mark down on that planet, facing death every minute of every fucking day, it's Chris who's had the harder time dealing with it all when it comes to moments like this, even after so much time.

“Turned the news on,” Chris adds; “caught the retrospective.”

“Ah,” Mark breathes; and that would explain the clinging. 

“Complete with the footage they archived from the salvaged recordings,” Chris goes on, and Mark’s arms around him tighten just a little more. “Tuned in just in time to catch some of the gripping highlights they recovered from your helmet cam.”

“Mmm, your favorites,” Mark nuzzles his hair, tries to make himself as present and tangible as possible, because Mark remembers the day those were first made public. Mark remembers the way Chris had shook to see all the almosts, to watch in real time what it meant to hope you'd live, but know you'd die.

To watch it, and know it was _Mark_.

“Can you go in late?” Chris asks, soft enough to be resigned to the neediness against his wishes, but strong enough to be long past any shame.

They've been long past shame for a good long time, really. 

“First day of classes for the newbies,” Mark murmurs, and regrets that reality, because he really just wants to bundle his Chris up the stairs and back into bed until long after the launch. “But I could get away with driving you to work.”

Chris is still, for a second, before he nods deep enough to kiss the pulse point at Mark’s wrist. 

“It’s gonna deprive me of watching the morning run with a cup of shit coffee and a vague sense of superior disinterest so as to maintain my Martian mystique, though,” Mark says, slowly turning Chris in his arms so he can look him in the eye, and let him see what he never puts in words but always means alongside the ones he says. “Think you can make that up to me?”

“Starbucks on the way?” Chris bargains, leaning bodily, boneless into Mark’s frame. “And this, ‘til we leave?”

And honestly? 

Mark couldn't really want for more than that. 

“Fair enough.”

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://hitlikehammers.tumblr.com).


End file.
